Why you should sell on marketplaces.

If you just have your online shop kicking around the internet these days and not leveraging the power of marketplaces you should read on.

Marketplaces serve the purpose of connecting a customer to a product they want. 

Amazon, the most popular online marketplace in the UK has an average of 407 million monthly visits. eBay is the second-most popular, with just under 298 million visits per month.*

Hopefully, we can agree marketplaces have a massive amount of traffic also known as your potential customer. 

A platform that has that amount of traffic can help you gain exposure to your products and brand quicker than you can to your own shop (unless you have a bottomless pit of cash for ad spend but still.. those numbers🤤)

If that alone isn’t enough to convince you why you should be using marketplaces here are 3 other benefits

• Marketplace SEO. Marketplaces act like search engines so they have their own SEO. Optimising your products for that specific marketplace can have your products ranking organically compared to trying to get your website to list organically in Google. 
• People cross-buy products. While people are shopping for the products they originally intended to buy, they can easily become distracted and start browsing items they might want to buy in the future. I’m here for a leaf blower but now I’m browsing oh and look I have just found this product, add it to the basket or save it for later. 
• Understand how people engage with your products. If you are getting lots of views that are not leading to sales this could indicate something needs to change on your listing. When you start to see patterns of behaviour you can begin to make tweaks like improving product photography, writing clearer or more engaging titles and descriptions or optimising your listings specifically for that platform. Rinse and repeat this process until your listing starts to convert into sales. 

Remember the overarching goal of marketing is brand and product awareness and putting your product in front of your desired customer. This is precisely what marketplaces can do and are ultimately a ‘free marketing’ tool that you only pay a % of the sales you make. Seems like a fair deal right?!

So what’s the next step…. well it’s to decide which marketplaces to sell on and that all comes down to the timeless question of who is your target audience and where they are likely to shop.

After you have decided which marketplaces you plan to include in your business strategy, it is time to focus on how you will run and manage a platform or multiple platforms alongside your current shop operations.

Whether you are just starting out or already established, hopefully, you will know why and how you can leverage marketplaces within your business.

*Stats taken from  https://www.webretailer.com/marketplaces-worldwide/online-marketplaces-uk/